Crime and Punishment. By: Fyodor Dostoyesky

Time spent reading: 24 Hours 30 Minutes.

I have been wondering around the edge of good literature and understand that you cannot be true lover of the art till you have read a Russian Novel. I decided to shrug my timidness and dive headfirst into the deep end with Crime and Punishment.

The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in literature

Short Summary

Crime and Punishment is what I would call a psychological thriller. First published in 1956, the story revolves around Rodion Raskolnikov. Rodion is a eldest son in a family consisting of a old mother who lives on a meager pension and does sowing and odds and end jobs to support herself and an younger sister who is beautiful, young, intelligent and works as a governess to support her family. They are a tightly bound family and love each other very much. Rodion comes to Saint Petersburg to study and further his carrier. Rodion is smart intelligent man who keeps to himself, had very few friends and though poor is very proud. He used to take tuitions in city and through that income and some financial support from his mother, he was pursuing his education.

Caught in the inevitable circle of poverty, he loses some of his tuitions and has to drop out of the university. He begins to sink into illness, he is feverish and descends into delirium, he lives in a very small cupboard of a room and has no money to pay the rent, his pride does not let him ask the already accommodating landlady for food. He ends up hungry for days on end. Rodion had written an article when he was in the university about how some people are above the law and can commit crime, because they are destined for greater things and are entitled to jump over hurdles to achieve their goals.

During his time in the university he is introduced to a old pawn broker women, who give money on interest to anyone who comes to her with pledge. She is wicked old wench with a reputation of being ruthless and confiscating the pledges kept with her even if the person is late by just a day or two. This woman has a younger half-sister whom she beats and keeps under her thumb. Rodion plans to kill this wicked pawn broker and rob her, this way stepping over his hurdles of poverty and use the money for the betterment of as many poor people as he could. Rodion who is miserable and ill as it is is taken deeper into the vise of his illness by this thought. Rodion finally take the life altering decision and kills the pawn broker, he unwillingly also has to kill her timid and weak little sister who unexpectedly walks into the house. In his frenzy Rodion who is not a thief or a murderer and has not actually planned anything like a man of experience would could not even rob the woman properly and till the very end did not even look into what he has stolen from her flat.

Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion who finds himself racked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust for what he has done. His justifications disintegrate completely as he struggles with guilt and horror and confronts the real-world consequences of his deed.

My Review

When they Russian Novels are dark, they do not prepare you for just how dark they are. Speaking for myself, it was a good thing, I read this book during the summertime and when I was mentally and physically in a good space. The translation from the original Russian to English done by Contant Skynet is brilliant. Though the title of the book is crime and punishment the novel does not directly deal with the actual crime and its formal punishment. The real punishment is Rodion’s internal struggle, the book details his conscious as punishing him so much that in the end he is a broken man takes the legal punishment almost as the only step towards his salvation.

The novel is divided in to 6 part and an Epilogue. The language is simple to understand and the storyline is easy to follow, there are certain plots which happen in flashbacks but they are not distractions in any ways, the pace of the story is slow at the beginning, but almost halfway through it picks up nicely. The writer does a beautiful job in keeping the mood of the book consistently intense throughout the book, it is like standing in the middle of a heavy rainfall, there is no respite and you are constantly hammered to keep your head down. The novel is written in the third person perspective, it is told primarily from the point of view of Rodion, it sometimes switches to the perspective of other characters. The unique thing about the writing is use of time shifts of memory and the manipulation of temporal sequence. You are with the primary character and suddenly some word or action of someone else or the mention of something take you back to a vague memory of him doing something or saying something. The late nineteenth century reader was not used to this kind of writing.

One thing that you should to do right at the beginning is keep a cheat sheet of the names of the character and how each character relates to another. Some characters are introduced abruptly, they are however described in detail, not all of them have backstories and neither are all of they present too long in the story plot, but each plays its parts to perfection in taking the story forward. The text is a bit verbose for the 21st century but the quality of the writing is beyond doubt, many a times a small fact that takes up only a line will have reverberations fifty pages later. You cannot skip a couple of page, it will effect the continuity of the story. Each character has a unique language and thing like the sentence formation of the length of dialogue that each character has is unique only to him.

Just like names in India and particularly in the south of India the names of the principal characters in Russian have a double meaning and define some characteristics of the person. This however is lost in translation due to differences in language structure and culture. The Epilogue is satisfactory at bringing an end to this part of the story though it leads towards a sequel which will take the story of the chief characters forward.